Despite being one of the most common activities we use our computers for, finding a good desktop email client seems harder than it should be. Most apps are trying to do more than I need and getting me to pay for it, so finding a good solution has been tough.
I’ve tried Mozilla Thunderbird in the past, though, and while I didn’t stick with it at the time, I figured it was time for another shot. And as it turns out, it might just be the exact option I was looking for all along.
It’s entirely free
No premium features and no AI
I’ve looked around for email clients a few times, and it feels like most often they’re either just bad or, to make them useful, I have to pay up for things like supporting multiple accounts, or more than a certain number of accounts. Many also have intrusive AI features or things I don’t need in my email accounts.
All I want is to be able to see all my accounts in one place, and to be able to filter through incoming messages myself. Thunderbird makes this pretty easy. I can enter my email address, and — at least for Outlook and Gmail accounts — it can automatically determine the protocol to use for syncing my mail, as well as the requirement for OAuth authentication, so it takes me to my default browser to sign me in.
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Once I’m signed in, the UI gets out of my way and just focuses on the essential. I can see my accounts, their respective email folders, and messages, and that’s it. The app doesn’t need to tell me how to use it or “make the most of it”; it just works.
Unified inboxes and calendars
Everything I need at a glance
One of my favorite features in Thunderbird is the unified inbox, which is a simple enough concept, and certainly not exclusive to this app, but I always appreciate it. I can choose to display separate email folders for each account or unify them, and it’s not necessarily one or the other. I can also just have both and reorder them so the unified view comes first, but I can easily scroll down if I need a detailed view of a specific account.
One thing that I think is new — or at least I don’t remember seeing it before — is the seamless calendar integration. On the right side of the Thunderbird window, I can see my upcoming events and meetings for the next few days, and it’s very handy for staying on top of everything I have going on.
Because Thunderbird is purpose-built for classic desktop PCs, all these UI elements have room to breathe and I can see all this information densely packed, which I also appreciate. I’ll admit I’ve expressed my interest in touch-friendly interfaces before, which this isn’t, but these days, I mostly work from a proper desktop, and this is the perfect UI for me to take in all the information I need from my email accounts.
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On that note, I also love how Thunderbird handles displaying all of its content thanks to tabs. It’s such a universally-loved concept when it comes to web browsers, but Thunderbird is the first email client I’ve seen that adopts a similar approach, and it’s been doing it for years. It makes it easier to stay on top of everything email related without having to juggle a dozen pop-up windows for different conversations. Thunderbird still pops out windows for the message composer, and that’s fine, though it would be nice to still hae the option to open new messages in tabs too.
There’s a bit more than email, too
Calendar, tasks, and… chat?
I mostly care about the email and calendar features, but Thunderbird actually includes a couple more tabs that might be interesting, particularly if you’ve been on the internet for a long time.
First off, there’s Tasks, which is, as you might expect, a to-do list. It doesn’t integrate with my calendars as I thought it might, but I can create and see my upcoming tasks relatively easily, assign them priority levels, and so on. I can’t add tasks to existing calendars in a way that sends them to the cloud, but I can link them to specific accounts in Thunderbird, so when I open the calendar view, the tasks sidebar still shows me tasks linked to that account.
As for chat, it’s an interesting capability that’s meant to be used with classic internet chat protocols such as IRC chat rooms or XMPP. Notably, Thunderbird can also be a Matrix client, so if you’re a fan of this decentralized messaging protocol, you can use it through here, too. I can see how that might make sense in a professional environment, and so it’s not completely unreasonable for Thunderbird to integrate it. Admittedly, I’m not on any platform that uses these protocols, though I did sign in to an IRC server just to see if it would work, and it does.
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The initial sync can take a while
It downloads every message
If there’s one thing I wish Thunderbird handled a bit differently, it’s the way it initially syncs content from my accounts. By default, and like other desktop clients such as Outlook, it downloads every single message across the accounts I add, but thankfully, this can be changed.
It’s not the most intuitive, as options related to syncing and storage are set per account and not on a global basis, but it’s nice to have the option anyway. I can go into each account’s settings and set them to save messages from the past 30 days, which is a pretty generous cut-off date already. Doing this doesn’t mean I can’t find older messages, it just means the servers will be searched in real-time when I perform a search, rather than having potentially hundreds of megabytes taken on my local storage for no good reason.
To be clear, I understand this isn’t everyone’s preference, but it works much better for me. I kind of wish these settings were shown during the initial setup rather than default to taking up as much storage as possible on my PC.
Thunderbird is fantastic
Mozilla Thunderbird has been going for over two decades at this point, and that’s both easy to understand and somewhat surprising. It’s easily the best email client on desktop that I’ve ever used, so I’m glad it’s still in active development, but at the same time, it feels like it doesn’t truly get the attention it deserves, and I’m surprised it’s managed to stay this good for so long. If you haven’t tried it before, I highly recommend it.
OS
Windows, Linus, macOS, iOS, Android
Individual pricing
Free